Easy Content Marketing

by Barbara Saunders

It’s been said that we’re leaving the ‘Information Age’ and entering the ‘Implementation Age.’ If you want to succeed – and thrive – as a Solo Pro you need to learn to use information to drive clients to you for help with implementation. Content Marketing and Curation is key. To stand apart from the generic service provider you need to be perceived as an expert.

Content Marketing and Curation is like sharing your ice cream.

In this article I’m going to explain what each is and why it’s so essential to your business branding and positioning and then I’m going to share a few of my favorite tools to make it so easy to do this yourself. I’m going to challenge you to try to add Content Marketing and Curation to your weekly marketing schedule – I’ll explain in a moment, but let’s start with a few definitions:

Content Marketing is content you’ve created yourself and released through different channels which might include:

Articles, blogs, and email newsletters
Videos and podcasts
Live talks, presentations
Webinars and teleseminars
white papers and reports
or others…

Content Curation is content created by others that you deem of value to your followers. When you pull that content into your sphere you become an ‘Information Hub’ that your followers come to trust as the ‘go-to’ source for informaiton in your area of expertise. Sources of this type of information might include:

Industry newsletters and articles
National and business articles (like Harvard Business Review)
Events and workshops you attend
Videos, radio interviews, etc

Your followers can search the web for days, find all sorts of conflicting information – or they can come to you. When you present yourself as the expert in this field and you present pre-flitered information with your stamp of approval on it, you’re doing your followers a huge service. It relieves the overwhelm and confusion. It also raises the value of what you provide – meaning you can now charge more.

An additional bonus is that as you bring more people to your site to see the content you’re creating or curating, not only does your SEO rankings improve drastically but since you’ve got them on your site, you’ve got an interested audience for your promotions. Be sure every opportunity has a call to action.
My Favorite Content Marketing and Curation Tools

RebelMouse. This free tool pulls in all of the things you’ve created and posted on your social media platforms or your blog and it puts all of that into a grid and displays it like your own daily newspaper. It keeps it current. You can embed its stream (with a pre-generated code) onto a page on your website. Here’s an example of mine on my radio site here: http://soloproradio.com/rebelmouse/. It’s nice and easy. It brings really dynamic content into your website.

Scoop.It. This service goes out onto the web and searches for content that relates to your chosen keywords or phrases and displays it for you. You can choose to ‘scoop’ a resource or discard it. Then it posts it to your stream. BTW: Scoop it also has a widget that you can embed in your website. I have one also posted on my radio site’s home page: http://soloproradio.com/ (It’s at the bottom of the page – you’ll have to scroll – on the right side). Additionally, Scoop.It has a button that you put on your browser’s toolbar so that when you’re researching on the web and run across information/articles that you think your people should read, you can ‘scoop it’ right there and it puts it into your stream.

Evernote. This tool has been around for a while but it’s HUGELY valuable if you do any type of research or creating content. With Evernote you can capture website, images, or even offline data. You can assign tags or categories to them and even sort them by product or concept to keep them organized. It’s a free tool as well and your data is saved in the cloud so that you can get to it from any device.

Adding Content Marketing and Curation to your weekly plan

Spending just an hour a week on the content portion of your marketing will have a drastic affect in your SEO and the traffic to your website. Fine tuning your calls to action and the offers you’ve got on your website will increase conversions.

Try to blog at least once a week, if not more – and then get out there and ‘scoop’ the articles that you think you’re followers will be interested in. This is how you begin to stand apart as a leader and present yourself as an expert.

Author Info: Barbara Saunders is a publication designer and has run a successful solo pro business for more than a decade by maximizing the power of partnerships and collaboration. Now as the Solo Pro Success Coach and Founder of the Solo Pro Academy, she’s here to guide you to a successful custom-fit business. She also hosts the Solo Pro Radio show everyday at 10am Pacific and 1pm Eastern.